Decline In Listeners Worries Orchestras

By ANNE MIDGETTE

Published: June 25, 2005

It was a typical July night at the Ravinia Festival last year. Deborah Voigt was singing in Act I of Wagner's ''Walk?'' with James Conlon leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra: a magnificent night of music. And the pavilion in which the orchestra performs was half full.

''There was an epiphany for me,'' said Welz Kauffman, the president of Ravinia. ''It's a moral issue. There should not be anyone missing this.'' It is less about revenue and filling seats, he continued, adding that what mattered was: ''There are people who would really love this. How do we get to them?''

How indeed? Ravinia, in Highland Park, Ill., was originally built as an amusement park, but since 1936 it has been the summer home of the Chicago Symphony. Today it presents everything from the Doobie Brothers to Stephen Sondheim, from cabaret to chamber music, but the symphony -- which began its 2005 season there last night -- remains the festival's centerpiece.

Yet while Ravinia is selling more tickets every summer, sales for Chicago Symphony events there have fallen by about one-third since 1990. The pavilion seats 3,100, Mr. Kauffman said, and the symphony averages audiences of about 2,300. That's a lot of empty seats.

All over the Western world, the alarm is sounding that classical music is in trouble. Orchestra subscription sales are dropping widely, in some cases by as much as two percentage points a year. Ensembles are not balancing their budgets. Audiences are getting older; young people are turned off by classical music. The Chicago Symphony can no longer sell decently even at its own festival. So, at least, goes the refrain.

Is it true that people don't want classical music anymore? Or is it just a question of how to give it to them? And is it even possible -- heresy of heresies -- that they are being given too much of it?

By their very nature, orchestras cannot follow the laws of supply and demand. Major orchestras give their musicians contracts for 52 weeks a year, then have to figure out how to occupy them. This is one reason orchestras have summer festivals in the first place: to give the musicians something to do.

This does not always mean that they are responding to a burning desire on the part of a music-starved audience. Take the New York Philharmonic's Summertime Classics series, a set of eight concerts in June and July representing the lighter side of the classical repertory. The Philharmonic began the series last summer and sold to about 60 percent of capacity. It is quite possible that the series will do better this year, but it is also clear that it was not exactly leapt upon by a starving public.

In fact, a glut on the market may be a problem for the orchestra business as a whole. Even people who like classical music may not want or need quite so much of it. It's one thing at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Lenox, Mass.: people make special trips there and plan to spend several days listening to music. It's another thing in the heart of New York or, as with Ravinia, in a suburb of Chicago, where people may decide to take in a concert on the spur of the moment.

Mr. Kauffman noted that one of the orchestra's problems at the festival was its longstanding tradition of offering three concerts in a row, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. No matter who is performing with the orchestra, he said, one of those concerts always fails to do well. Recognizing that members of his target audience may go away on weekends, he is considering breaking with tradition and offering some orchestra concerts during the week instead.

It does not help that classical music clings to its traditions, which, like this one, can hold the field back in the 21st century.

''The marketing of symphony music hasn't changed in 20, 25 years,'' Mr. Kauffman said, pointing out that rather than working to win over new audiences, the average newspaper advertisement for a classical event simply lists names that are probably unfamiliar to a majority of readers.

Classical organizations are slow to recognize the need for change in other ways as well. The Philadelphia Orchestra has two summer homes: the Mann Center for the Performing Arts, an outdoor setting in Philadelphia, and the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York.

Since 2000, the Mann Center has followed a pattern familiar to most orchestras in the United States: a steady decline in subscriptions not quite compensated for by a steady rise in single-ticket sales. The traditional subscription model on which orchestras have depended for decades is not compatible with the flexibility of a 21st-century lifestyle: fewer and fewer people are willing or able to commit a given evening every week for months ahead.

But what was notable at the Mann Center was that sales of tickets on the lawn jumped considerably from 2002 to 2003, when the center made it possible to reserve tickets in advance and even buy them on the Internet. That's a pretty simple way to bring in 8,000 more people.

What also works is a sense of event. The Philadelphia Orchestra's sales at Saratoga have been declining by about 5 percent a season, according to the performing arts center's chief financial officer, Richard Geary. But for Saratoga's 40th season this summer, the orchestra has put together an all-star lineup, including Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax, Martha Argerich, Van Cliburn and others. Ticket sales, Mr. Geary said, are already 25 percent ahead of where they were at this time last year.

By the same token, while the New York Philharmonic has to struggle to sell tickets for its ''Summertime Classics'' at Avery Fisher Hall, tickets for its residency at the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival in Colorado in July are already virtually sold out.

An article in The Times of London last summer bemoaned this very fact: that festivals with all-star concerts play to full houses while local orchestras in England struggle to attract audiences. ''Audiences are looking to the arts as sensation rather than sustenance,'' Magnus Linklater wrote.

But this is hardly surprising, given the way the arts tend to be marketed. Classical music is positioned as something transcendent, sublime, with great artists and stars. That's pretty heady stuff. And it's understandable that someone who expects this kind of intensity from a classical concert may be perfectly content going only once or twice a year, rather than making a steady diet of such rich fare.

This comes back to another common refrain: the decline in arts education, which makes classical music in particular seem more rarefied than essential.

''When you have a change, you have to understand why you have a change,'' said Deborah R. Card, the president of the Chicago Symphony. ''It's about programs and techniques: what are you putting on stage, what's the format, who's being presented.''

The Chicago Symphony's ticket sales during the regular season have mirrored the national decline, falling from near capacity in the 1990's to somewhere between 81 and 84 percent today. ''We need to make audience development a priority,'' Ms. Card said, citing a program she instituted that provides $10 tickets to students. Last year, about 1,500 responded; this year, more than 7,000.

Mr. Kauffman has his own idea about how to address the decline. His semiformal ''Full House'' program involves enlisting members of the Ravinia board and staff to bring four new people -- who have not been to a symphony concert at Ravinia for at least five years -- to Chicago Symphony concerts every summer.

Through this program, and by following up with the newcomers to hear what they thought, Mr. Kaufmann hopes to win perhaps 50 new audience members per concert per summer. He also recognizes that not all of them will want to come more than once.

''It's a deliberate, slow way of going about building the audience back'' at the same rate as the original decline, Mr. Kauffman said. ''In about 12 or 15 years, we'll be back to a full house.''

Photo: James Conlon conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival last summer. (Photo by Todd Rosenberg)